--- "harij at excite.com" <harij at excite.com> wrote:
[..]
> Kartik's reply seems to trudge a similar line. He posits God
> because of the explanatory gaps being present in Physicalism.
Please go back to my reply to your original posting and show me
where I postulate the existence of a God. Words such as "God",
"Supreme Being" or "Absolute" appear nowhere in my reply, which
you can find at
http://www.escribe.com/religion/advaita/m16475.html
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of my posting to claim that
I was interested in taking a route that resulted in a proof of
God's existence. My posting had to do more with the *refutation*
of physicalism than with anything else. I wanted to mainly point
out that physicalism suffers from several defects - the foremost
being the inexplicability of conscious experience (such as
sweetness/bitterness, pleasure/pain, etc. which go by the name
of "qualia" in Western philosophy). This has been pointed out
several times by contemporary philosophers, one such famous
instance being the paper by David Chalmers, which you can find
online at http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
advaita VedAnta easily gets around the above problem of
consciousness that physicalism faces, by claiming that there is
no "cause" for the existence of consciousness, and that
consciousness cannot be derived from the elements. The only way
to "explain" consciousness is in the negative (since positive
explanations fail), by means of "neti, neti" - "not so, not so".
BTW, advaita VedAnta claims that the existence of God cannot be
known by logical/experiential means, but only from scripture.
-Kartik
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